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Family Three
Meredith grew up in an eccentric family of three with love enough to go around. There was even enough left over for friends, relatives and stray animals, some of whom were millions of years old.
You could call it ecological balance, she thought. We all depended on each other to fill in what we ourselves lacked. It worked.
Mother and Father had always known what to do, but they had disappeared in an avalanche at the Anasazi ruins. She would be there soon. Meredith felt a heavy weight pulling at her heart.
Practicality
Meredith's mother, Jean Jacobs was a practical woman. No other archaeologist was more precise in her measurements of artifacts; none more thorough in her classification of relics.
"Shanshu, why aren't the men working?" Jean asked her overseer at the Shanghai dig. "Pardon, Dr. Jacobs," the overseer answered hesitantly. "They fear punishment, ma'am. An artifact has been damaged."
"What artifact?"
"The blue vase, ma'am. The one with Ming precursor symbols."
"That vase is a hopeless fraud! Shanshu, tell the men to dig, dig, dig and bring me intact whatever they find. I'm looking for something that's worth breaking."
"Yes, Dr. Jacobs."
Native Myths
Jean Jacobs had another side. Despite her practicality, she loved mythology and collected stories everywhere she traveled. Her books about native cultures had been translated into 52 languages.
Meredith's mother used to lull her to sleep with native myths. By the time she was five, Meredith could recite the creation myths of Samoa, the Aleutian Islands, Zimbabwe, the Tainos of Puerto Rico and the Anasazi.
Meredith learned the lore of kivas from her anthropologist mother. At night the girl used to dream
about crawling through a magical sipapu and emerging into a beautiful land above the clouds where the sun always shone and fantastical creatures played pipes and sang mysterious songs.
Do It Right
Meredith had inherited these traits from her mother. Her ecological perspective was practical. Get the job done and do it right. Forget about abstract theories and political posturing. Above all she loved animals and nature.
In the ten years since her parents' disappearance, Meredith had risen to the top of her profession. She was now an expert on the effects of climate change on animal habitats of the high desert. She had delivered a paper on the topic at the Ecological Society convention held in Paris this past spring.
Recording Statistics
Meredith spent much of her time
outdoors among the animals she loved. She observed how the grasses and trees
from rainy southern lands were shifting northward due to the warming weather
patterns. But the high desert couldn't sustain the moisture loving plants.
The small animals and the predators that fed on them, the birds and the deer,
moved north too, but finding less to eat, were dying off. They couldn't return
to their own lands, which had undergone change also.
Meredith recorded the statistics. How many young in a litter, how many creatures to an acre of land. She filled many hours observing the animals who made their homes in the high desert, gathering food and raising their young, and felt a great kinship with them.
For Meredith, ecology was intimacy, understanding and hope. She wrote articles on her findings and published them in professional journals.
Gestalt
Meredith's father, Andrew Markey was a well known gestalt psychologist whose work on the subject of self-discovery at Esalen had earned him fame and respect. Later in India he studied meditation and came home to found a healing center in Santa Fe. When his interests turned to Native American practices, he became absorbed with the ways of the southwest tribes, taking part in their solstice and sweat lodge ceremonies.
Beautiful Butterflies
He used to fascinate his young daughter with tales of shamans and healers. He told her about Black Elk, the revered medicine man, who saw, in a vision, a colorful cloud of beautiful butterflies crying for his help.
When Meredith was older, her father taught her how to dream while awake and gently led her on journeys of exploration through the inner landscape, where she discovered her own monsters and helpers, none too large to conquer with her father's kindly guidance.
My Dolly
He taught her about living in the moment, and about using the world of energy to do good.
"My dolly has a broken arm, Daddy," she would say.
"Visualize the arm healing itself," he would reply, smiling at her lovingly. "Think of the fibers knitting together again, little tiger. Send good energy to your dolly, and she will get well."
"But Mommy said to put her arm in a splint."
"Your Mommy has her ways, and I have mine, little tiger. That's why we work so well together."
Buried Alive
Late one spring Meredith received a terrible phone call at her graduate school, informing her that her mother and father had been lost in a landslide of gravel and stone while they were excavating an Anasazi site in the mountainous Bandelier National Monument near Santa Fe.
She flew there immediately and waited in agony for news of their rescue. She joined the volunteers who searched desperately through the rubble, but they found nothing. Long after the search was declared hopeless, Meredith continued alone.
Wave Goodbye
One day, after digging all morning, Meredith sat on a stone to rest. As she gazed across the canyon to the nearby mountains, she saw a vision of her mother and father striding across the mountain ridge happy and carefree. They turned and looked into her eyes, smiling, then strode away across the mountains.
At last Meredith accepted that they were gone and a measure of calm came over her. She returned home to Santa Fe to settle their affairs.